Indian Label Awards winners announced

Andy Thomas reports from the Indian Label Awards ceremony, held last week during Labelexpo India

There were a record 178 entries to the Indian Label Awards, which were organized jointly by the LMAI and the Tarsus Labels Group and sponsored by Avery Dennison, Omet, HP, Nilpeter, UPM Raflatac, SMI Coated Products, Orthotec, Label Planet, Rotometrics, Rotatek and Creed Engineers.

The host for the evening was the glamorous Shonali Nagrani, a former Miss India. The awards were introduced by LMAI president Vivek Kapoor, who said the Indian converter industry has now reached global standards of excellence and is on a healthy road to future growth.

‘There has been much speculation about how many international presses are being imported into India and there is double digit growth in end user label requirements. This is truly a take-off point for the Indian labels industry,’ Kapoor told a packed event.

The LMAI was very keen to emphasize that the judging was carried out entirely independently, and to avoid any suspicion of conflict of interest, Kapoor withdrew his labels from the competition. The judging panel consisted of Kiran Prayagi, Rajiv Dhar and Deepak Manchanda, with the latter stressing that the labels were judged ‘blind’ without knowing the names of the submitting companies.

Anil Sharma, managing director, materials South East Asia for Gold awards sponsor Avery Dennison, said that India is on the way to creating ‘one of the world’s great label markets’. He emphasized the importance of educating end users in the benefits of pressure-sensitive labeling and outlined the commitment of Avery Dennison to helping create the conditions for growth. He cited the $50m investment the company has poured into materials manufacturing at its Pune plant in India, as well as announcing a Bangalore distribution center for 2011 – to cheers from the audience.

Sharma finished with a call for the Indian government to continue its tentative moves towards FDI in the organized retail sector, saying this would ‘allow us to have great growth opportunities’.

Following the presentation of the awards, Mike Fairley was presented with an LMAI Lifetime Achievement award. Fairley then went on to present awards to the Indian winners of the World Label Association awards. The awards were presented to Any Graphics, which also won WLA awards in 2005 and 2008, and Gururaj Ballarwad for Wintek Flexo. Harveer Sahni, MD of Weldon Celloplast, was recognized for his role in the WLA judging panel. The audience was also asked to acknowledge the hard work of the Tarsus organizing team – particularly Jade Grace and Claire Farrugia – and the LMAI working committee: president Vivek Kapoor, vice president Ajay Agarwal, secretary RL Deshpande, and treasurer and Young Managers Club president Sandeep Zaveri. The YMC has been extremely active in India and much of the credit goes to Zaveri and to treasurer Pawandeep Sahni of Weldon Celloplast.

The award winners in full – who now go forward for the next WLA awards – are:

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